military

Guam came into America's consciousness this past week as the war of words between President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un threatened the island of Guam with nuclear annihilation. The rhetoric has since cooled but America is more aware of how little they really know about Guam or how much the legacy of war is part of their daily life.

North Korea said early Saturday that its intercontinental ballistic missile test on Friday showed its program could hit the United States, according to a statement reported by The Associated Press and Reuters.

The U.S. Department of Defense says the missile, which launched just before midnight local time, traveled roughly 620 miles — from the country's northern province of Jagang to the Sea of Japan, where it finally splashed into the waters off Japan's west coast.

A Marine Corps refueling tanker crashed Monday afternoon in a field 85 miles north of Jackson, Miss., killing all aboard, 15 Marines and one Navy sailor.

Six of the Marines and the Navy sailor were from the Marine Corps Forces Special Operations Command at Camp Lejeune, N.C. A Marine Corps spokesperson said they were traveling with their "associated equipment" en route to Marine Corps Air Station Yuma, Ariz.

The community of Watertown, Connecticut is mourning the loss of Tan Huynh, who was among seven U.S. Navy sailors who died when their destroyer collided with a merchant ship off the coast of Japan on Saturday.

The headline shocked the close-knit world of the surface Navy: Seven sailors aboard the destroyer USS Fitzgerald were killed, and other crew members injured, when the warship collided with a cargo vessel off Japan.

As the Navy family grieves, both it and the wider world are asking the same question: How did this happen?

The U.S. Senate is expected to vote this week on a resolution introduced by Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy to block a small part of the massive arms sale the Trump administration has agreed to with Saudi Arabia.

On the heels of last week's G-7 summit, German Chancellor Angela Merkel issued a wake-up call for European Union nations on Sunday. At a Munich stop on the campaign trail, Merkel told supporters that Europe can no longer count on the U.S. and the U.K. as reliable allies.

The days that Europe could completely rely on others are "over to a certain extent," Merkel warned at a rally in a packed Bavarian beer tent, Reuters reports. "I've experienced this in the last few days."

At a NATO summit in Brussels, President Trump marked the unveiling of memorials of the Berlin Wall and the Sept. 11 attacks with a speech that, among other things, told gathered NATO leaders their levels of defense funding are "not fair" to U.S. taxpayers.

Trump also omitted any clear statement of support for Article 5, the NATO mutual-defense pledge — something other leaders had been hoping to hear.

They're in the books we read, the shows we watch, and the art we hang on our walls. They conjure notions of might, magic, romance, and more. Castles, perhaps as much as any other architectural structure in history, define the landscape of our fantasy and imagination.